A novel elitist multiobjective optimization algorithm: Multiobjective extremal optimization

Recently, a general-purpose local-search heuristic method called extremal optimization (EO) has been successfully applied to some NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. This paper presents an investigation on EO with its application in numerical multiobjective optimization and proposes a new novel elitist (1 + λ) multiobjective algorithm, called multiobjective extremal optimization (MOEO). In order to extend EO to solve the multiobjective optimization problems, the Pareto dominance strategy is introduced to the fitness assignment of the proposed approach. We also present a new hybrid mutation operator that enhances the exploratory capabilities of our algorithm. The proposed approach is validated using five popular benchmark functions. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms. Thus MOEO can be considered a good alternative to solve numerical multiobjective optimization problems.     

A new multiobjective simulated annealing algorithm

A new multiobjective simulated annealing algorithm for continuous optimization problems is presented. The algorithm has an adaptive cooling schedule and uses a population of fitness functions to accurately generate the Pareto front. Whenever an improvement with a fitness function is encountered, the trial point is accepted, and the temperature parameters associated with the improving fitness functions are cooled. Beside well known linear fitness functions, special elliptic and ellipsoidal fitness functions, suitable for the generation on non-convex fronts, are presented. The effectiveness of the algorithm is shown through five test problems. The parametric study presented shows that more fitness functions as well as more iteration gives more non-dominated points closer to the actual front. The study also compares the linear and elliptic fitness functions. The success of the algorithm is also demonstrated by comparing the quality metrics obtained to those obtained for a well-known evolutionary multiobjective algorithm.     

The influence of the fitness evaluation method on the performance of multiobjective search algorithms

In this paper we are concerned with finding the Pareto optimal front or a good approximation to it. Since non-dominated solutions represent the goal in multiobjective optimisation, the dominance relation is frequently used to establish preference between solutions during the search. Recently, relaxed forms of the dominance relation have been proposed in the literature for improving the performance of multiobjective search methods. This paper investigates the influence of different fitness evaluation methods on the performance of two multiobjective methodologies when applied to a highly constrained two-objective optimisation problem. The two algorithms are: the Pareto archive evolutionary strategy and a population-based annealing algorithm. We demonstrate here, on a highly constrained problem, that the method used to evaluate the fitness of candidate solutions during the search affects the performance of both algorithms and it appears that the dominance relation is not always the best method to use.     

A Proximal Point-Type Method for Multicriteria Optimization

In this paper, we present a proximal point algorithm for multicriteria optimization, by assuming an iterative process which uses a variable scalarization function. With respect to the convergence analysis, firstly we show that, for any sequence generated from our algorithm, each accumulation point is a Pareto critical point for the multiobjective function. A more significant novelty here is that our paper gets full convergence for quasi-convex functions. In the convex or pseudo-convex cases, we prove convergence to a weak Pareto optimal point. Another contribution is to consider a variant of our algorithm, obtaining the iterative step through an unconstrained subproblem. Then, we show that any sequence generated by this new algorithm attains a Pareto optimal point after a finite number of iterations under the assumption that the weak Pareto optimal set is weak sharp for the multiobjective problem.     

Multiobjective improved spatial fuzzy c-means clustering for image segmentation combining Pareto-optimal clusters

In this paper, we propose a grayscale image segmentation method based on a multiobjective optimization approach that optimizes two complementary criteria (region and edge based). The region-based fitness used is the improved spatial fuzzy c-means clustering measure that is shown performing better than the standard fuzzy c-means (FCM) measure. The edge-based fitness used is based on the contour statistics and the number of connected components in the image segmentation result. The optimization algorithm used is the multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), which is well suited to handle continuous variables problems, the case of FCM clustering. In our case, each particle of the swarm codes the centers of clusters. The result of the multiobjective optimization technique is a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, where each solution represents a segmentation result. Instead of selecting one solution from the Pareto front, we propose a method that combines all solutions to get a better segmentation. The combination method takes place in two steps. The first step is the detection of high-confidence points by exploiting the similarity between the results and the membership degrees. The second step is the classification of the remaining points by using the high-confidence extracted points. The proposed method was evaluated on three types of images: synthetic images, simulated MRI brain images and real-world MRI brain images. This method was compared to the most widely used FCM-based algorithms of the literature. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.     

Fast calculation of multiobjective probability of improvement and expected improvement criteria for Pareto optimization

The use of surrogate based optimization (SBO) is widely spread in engineering design to reduce the number of computational expensive simulations. However, “real-world” problems often consist of multiple, conflicting objectives leading to a set of competitive solutions (the Pareto front). The objectives are often aggregated into a single cost function to reduce the computational cost, though a better approach is to use multiobjective optimization methods to directly identify a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, which can be used by the designer to make more efficient design decisions (instead of weighting and aggregating the costs upfront). Most of the work in multiobjective optimization is focused on multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). While MOEAs are well-suited to handle large, intractable design spaces, they typically require thousands of expensive simulations, which is prohibitively expensive for the problems under study. Therefore, the use of surrogate models in multiobjective optimization, denoted as multiobjective surrogate-based optimization, may prove to be even more worthwhile than SBO methods to expedite the optimization of computational expensive systems. In this paper, the authors propose the efficient multiobjective optimization (EMO) algorithm which uses Kriging models and multiobjective versions of the probability of improvement and expected improvement criteria to identify the Pareto front with a minimal number of expensive simulations. The EMO algorithm is applied on multiple standard benchmark problems and compared against the well-known NSGA-II, SPEA2 and SMS-EMOA multiobjective optimization methods.     

Computing the Pareto frontier of a bi-objective bi-level linear problem using a multiobjective mixed-integer programming algorithm

In this article, we study the bi-level linear programming problem with multiple objective functions on the upper level (with particular focus on the bi-objective case) and a single objective function on the lower level. We have restricted our attention to this type of problem because the consideration of several objectives at the lower level raises additional issues for the bi-level decision process resulting from the difficulty of anticipating a decision from the lower level decision maker. We examine some properties of the problem and propose a methodological approach based on the reformulation of the problem as a multiobjective mixed 0–1 linear programming problem. The basic idea consists in applying a reference point algorithm that has been originally developed as an interactive procedure for multiobjective mixed-integer programming. This approach further enables characterization of the whole Pareto frontier in the bi-objective case. Two illustrative numerical examples are included to show the viability of the proposed methodology.     

A Projected Subgradient Method for Nondifferentiable Quasiconvex Multiobjective Optimization Problems

In this paper, we propose a projected subgradient method for solving constrained nondifferentiable quasiconvex multiobjective optimization problems. The algorithm is based on the Plastria subdifferential to overcome potential shortcomings known from algorithms based on the classical gradient. Under suitable, yet rather general assumptions, we establish the convergence of the full sequence generated by the algorithm to a Pareto efficient solution of the problem. Numerical results are presented to illustrate our findings.

     

A New Scalarization Technique to Approximate Pareto Fronts of Problems with Disconnected Feasible Sets

We introduce and analyze a novel scalarization technique and an associated algorithm for generating an approximation of the Pareto front (i.e., the efficient set) of nonlinear multiobjective optimization problems. Our approach is applicable to nonconvex problems, in particular to those with disconnected Pareto fronts and disconnected domains (i.e., disconnected feasible sets). We establish the theoretical properties of our new scalarization technique and present an algorithm for its implementation. By means of test problems, we illustrate the strengths and advantages of our approach over existing scalarization techniques such as those derived from the Pascoletti–Serafini method, as well as the popular weighted-sum method.     

A new multiobjective evolutionary algorithm

The Pareto-based approaches have shown some success in designing multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MEAs). Their methods of fitness assignment are mainly from the information of dominated and nondominated individuals. On the top of the hierarchy of MEAs, the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA) has been elaborately designed with this principle in mind. In this paper, we propose a (μ+λ) multiobjective evolutionary algorithm ((μ+λ) MEA), which discards the dominated individuals in each generation. The comparisons of the experimental results demonstrate that the (μ+λ) MEA outperforms SPEA on five benchmark functions with less computational efforts.     

On the structure of multiobjective combinatorial search space: MNK-landscapes with correlated objectives

The structure of the search space explains the behavior of multiobjective search algorithms, and helps to design well-performing approaches. In this work, we analyze the properties of multiobjective combinatorial search spaces, and we pay a particular attention to the correlation between the objective functions. To do so, we extend the multiobjective NK-landscapes in order to take the objective correlation into account. We study the co-influence of the problem dimension, the degree of non-linearity, the number of objectives, and the objective correlation on the structure of the Pareto optimal set, in terms of cardinality and number of supported solutions, as well as on the number of Pareto local optima. This work concludes with guidelines for the design of multiobjective local search algorithms, based on the main fitness landscape features.     

Robust multiobjective optimization & applications in portfolio optimization

Motivated by Markowitz portfolio optimization problems under uncertainty in the problem data, we consider general convex parametric multiobjective optimization problems under data uncertainty. For the first time, this uncertainty is treated by a robust multiobjective formulation in the gist of Ben-Tal and Nemirovski. For this novel formulation, we investigate its relationship to the original multiobjective formulation as well as to its scalarizations. Further, we provide a characterization of the location of the robust Pareto frontier with respect to the corresponding original Pareto frontier and show that standard techniques from multiobjective optimization can be employed to characterize this robust efficient frontier. We illustrate our results based on a standard mean–variance problem.     

Generalized Homotopy Approach to Multiobjective Optimization

This paper proposes a new generalized homotopy algorithm for the solution of multiobjective optimization problems with equality constraints. We consider the set of Pareto candidates as a differentiable manifold and construct a local chart which is fitted to the local geometry of this Pareto manifold. New Pareto candidates are generated by evaluating the local chart numerically. The method is capable of solving multiobjective optimization problems with an arbitrary number k of objectives, makes it possible to generate all types of Pareto optimal solutions, and is able to produce a homogeneous discretization of the Pareto set. The paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the set of Pareto candidates to form a (k-1)-dimensional differentiable manifold, provides the numerical details of the proposed algorithm, and applies the method to two multiobjective sample problems.     

求多目标优化问题Pareto最优解集的方法

主要讨论了无约束多目标优化问题Pareto最优解集的求解方法,其中问题的目标函数是C1连续函数.给出了Pareto最优解集的一个充要条件,定义了α强有效解,并结合区间分析的方法,建立了求解无约束多目标优化问题Pareto最优解集的区间算法,理论分析和数值结果均表明该算法是可靠和有效的.     

Dynamic algorithm selection for pareto optimal set approximation

This paper presents a meta-algorithm for approximating the Pareto optimal set of costly black-box multiobjective optimization problems given a limited number of objective function evaluations. The key idea is to switch among different algorithms during the optimization search based on the predicted performance of each algorithm at the time. Algorithm performance is modeled using a machine learning technique based on the available information. The predicted best algorithm is then selected to run for a limited number of evaluations. The proposed approach is tested on several benchmark problems and the results are compared against those obtained using any one of the candidate algorithms alone.     

Convergence of the projected gradient method for quasiconvex multiobjective optimization

We consider the projected gradient method for solving the problem of finding a Pareto optimum of a quasiconvex multiobjective function. We show convergence of the sequence generated by the algorithm to a stationary point. Furthermore, when the components of the multiobjective function are pseudoconvex, we obtain that the generated sequence converges to a weakly efficient solution.     

An Efficient Sampling Approach to Multiobjective Optimization

This paper presents a new approach to multiobjective optimization based on the principles of probabilistic uncertainty analysis. At the core of this approach is an efficient nonlinear multiobjective optimization algorithm, Minimizing Number of Single Objective Optimization Problems (MINSOOP), to generate a true representation of the whole Pareto surface. Results show that the computational savings of this new algorithm versus the traditional constraint method increase dramatically when the number of objectives increases. A real world case study of multiobjective optimal design of a best available control technology for Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and Sulfur Oxides (SOx) reduction illustrates the usefulness of this approach.     

Reduced Jacobian Method

In this paper, we present the Wolfe’s reduced gradient method for multiobjective (multicriteria) optimization. We precisely deal with the problem of minimizing nonlinear objectives under linear constraints and propose a reduced Jacobian method, namely a reduced gradient-like method that does not scalarize those programs. As long as there are nondominated solutions, the principle is to determine a direction that decreases all goals at the same time to achieve one of them. Following the reduction strategy, only a reduced search direction is to be found. We show that this latter can be obtained by solving a simple differentiable and convex program at each iteration. Moreover, this method is conceived to recover both the discontinuous and continuous schemes of Wolfe for the single-objective programs. The resulting algorithm is proved to be (globally) convergent to a Pareto KKT-stationary (Pareto critical) point under classical hypotheses and a multiobjective Armijo line search condition. Finally, experiment results over test problems show a net performance of the proposed algorithm and its superiority against a classical scalarization approach, both in the quality of the approximated Pareto front and in the computational effort.     

A method for generating a well-distributed Pareto set in nonlinear multiobjective optimization

A method is presented for generating a well-distributed Pareto set in nonlinear multiobjective optimization. The approach shares conceptual similarity with the Physical Programming-based method, the Normal-Boundary Intersection and the Normal Constraint methods, in its systematic approach investigating the objective space in order to obtain a well-distributed Pareto set. The proposed approach is based on the generalization of the class functions which allows the orientation of the search domain to be conducted in the objective space. It is shown that the proposed modification allows the method to generate an even representation of the entire Pareto surface. The generation is performed for both convex and nonconvex Pareto frontiers. A simple algorithm has been proposed to remove local Pareto solutions. The suggested approach has been verified by several test cases, including the generation of both convex and concave Pareto frontiers.